About 50 m from my house is a shop (dairy in NZ, corner shop in Australia).  I go here for my water maybe a couple of times a week.  They can’t speak English, and my Vietnamese is bad, so we do a lot of hand signals and smiling.  I got my good friend Trang to come along with me to be my translator so I could talk with them.

The two ladies are 80 (in the blue) and 82 and are 2 of 4 sisters who are all still alive, the other two sisters are married.  Seven people live in the house, 3 older ladies, a husband and wife and two children.  They have lived in the same house all of there lives and the two of them have never married.  Their reason was because they couldn’t afford to raise children.  I think they are amazing and very unselfish to think like that.

Before they had the shop they used to sell food from their house.  The shop is all they can do now and they don’t make much money, but they only need money for food, the house is free.  Their father was a construction work and their mother had a street food stall.

I asked them what changes they had noticed in HCM and they said it was the building of the tall buildings. They were here during the Vietnam War and they mentioned that this went on for about 30 years.  This including the fighting between the North and the South without the Americans.  Time was very tough then and they said that when the Americans arrived, they were very friendly and gave them canned food and they lived all around them.

What struck me about the pair is they are always happy and they are at their shop from about 6am till about 7:30pm everyday.  They didn’t complain and they wished me a safe journey back home and that they will be sad to see me go.  These are some of the beautiful people I have met here, I will miss them.